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What I enjoy about being a parent is that you pretty much just carry on regardless, whatever happens to you. In the old days if I’d had the mild to debilitating lurgy that I’m suffering from at the moment I’d have stayed in bed (though of course I wouldn’t have had the lurgy because I wouldn’t have had a baby), but staying in bed is not an option, so even though all three of us are under the weather, we got in the car and headed across town to meet my sister and niece.
To be fair it wasn’t until I was walking to the car that I realised I was feeling as bad as I did and once you’re out of the house you’ve invested so much effort that there’s no going back.
Some confusion over where we were meeting meant that we walked around Camden for fifteen minutes, even though, as it turned out, my family members were about 50 yards from where we’d parked. I was in a daze. I don’t really remember the drive there or the drive home. This isn’t really the right week to be starting out feeling this bad, but it’s going to make things interesting!
I was glad we made the effort as it was good to see the family and have some fun. We had more family coming round to ours for dinner later too and my wife’s childhood pen friend staying over (in the old days people used to communicate by something called a letter and it was traditional for kids to write to someone in another country just for the fun of it). My head dropped a bit at about 5pm and I needed a little lie down, but once I had some dinner inside me I felt a little bit better and we had some fun. Unfortunately Catie’s pen friend turned out to be quite allergic to our cats, which meant they couldn’t stay over after all - you’d think this would have come up in their long teenage correspondence. Either that or we were extremely boring company and they came up with a genius way to get away. You can try that yourself. Though it only works if your boring hosts have cats. You could claim to be allergic to plates or tables to something instead and just need to carry something to rub into your eyes and make them sting.
Still given the level of disease in the house it was probably wise for them to make a red-eyed exit. We still enjoyed a meal together as I tried to ascertain which of the two of them had sent the last letter when their teenage correspondence ended. They claimed not to remember, but I a sure one of them must recall the tears of rejection.
It's lovely they are still pals now, though pens are no longer involved - just the digital letter that is Facebook.
